The Spooky Fill

The man behind the avant-garde sounds of “Lost.”

Giacchino, who won an Oscar for “Up,” says, “ ‘Lost’ is the purest version of me musically.”Credit PHILIP BURKE

On September 22, 2004, Oceanic Flight 815, a plane en route from Sydney to Los Angeles, disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. Although the outside world assumed that everyone on board had perished, the plane actually crashed on an unmarked island, and some of the passengers survived. During the next several years, the castaways discovered that the island had many peculiar features: a potent electromagnetic field; a secret community of scientists, called the DHARMA Initiative; mysterious residents who had been alive for hundreds of years. Six survivors succeeded in leaving the island, only to return via a second plane. They eventually tried to release themselves from their predicament by detonating a derelict hydrogen bomb. This explosion seemed to result in yet another complication—the creation of a parallel reality in which the original flight landed on schedule, with its passengers’ lives radically altered.

In the world of the ABC sci-fi series “Lost,” where these grippingly unlikely events have occurred, time is a malleable entity, jumping forward and doubling back. In the world of the film composer Michael Giacchino—whose contribution has been so crucial to the show’s cult success that J. J. Abrams, its co-creator, told me, “ ‘Lost’ would not be on the air today if it were not for Michael”—time is always ticking away. Giacchino has only two or three days to write thirty or more minutes of music. Hours after finishing a score, he hands it off to an orchestra of skilled Los Angeles studio musicians—a rare luxury on network television. In the six years that Giacchino has been working on “Lost,” he has mobilized an army of compositional devices, from the harshly dissonant to the plaintively lyrical, helping to keep millions of people addicted to an often delirious plot. At once nerve-jangling and hypnotic, his music is integral to what Michael Emerson, a member of the cast, calls “the great soulful puzzle” of “Lost.”

One day in February, I visited Giacchino’s home, in Tarzana, in the San Fernando Valley, to watch him create the uncanny sounds that cause viewers to clutch their sofa pillows. A trim forty-two-year-old with tangled dark-brown hair, he padded around in an untucked button-down shirt, loose-fitting jeans, and running shoes. His studio is a smallish room on the second floor, with a window overlooking a pool. Film memorabilia surround his desk, giving the place the feel of a boy’s bedroom. But not every movie nerd possesses a manuscript of Herbert Spencer’s orchestrations of the John Williams score for “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Sitting on a shelf are bound copies of Giacchino’s own scores, including his music for the Pixar animated feature “Up,” for which he won an Academy Award, in March.

It was one-thirty on a Thursday afternoon. Two days earlier, Giacchino had received the rough cut of the sixth episode of the final season of “Lost.” (The finale will air on May 23rd.) Titled “Sundown,” the episode centers on Sayid Jarrah, who, like most characters on the show, is fleeing a dark past; he was a torture specialist in Saddam Hussein’s regime. On the island, Sayid has been recruited by a supernatural, shape-shifting being known as the Man in Black. A second story line follows Sayid’s fortunes in the parallel reality created by the H-bomb blast. Viewers who struggle with the twists and turns of “Lost” may find it reassuring that Giacchino, too, sometimes scratches his head over the fine points of the plot. He doesn’t read the scripts ahead of time or discuss story lines with the writers and producers, preferring to react as events unfold. “I sit here in my bubble and try to figure it out,” he says.

After serving coffee and showing me a prized memento—a ceramic statuette of the Virgin Mary that, early in “Lost,” concealed a bag of heroin—Giacchino sat down at his desk. In front of him were two twenty-seven-inch screens running Digital Performer, a film-friendly form of music software. A television monitor displayed the footage that he was scoring. In front of the screens was a piano-style keyboard. On top of it was a pocket-size music sketchbook, which had a couple of melodic ideas jotted down.

“This season has been difficult, because everybody needs new themes,” Giacchino explained. “In previous seasons, I got it down to a pretty good system: Sayid appears, Sayid’s theme plays. But this isn’t the same guy. It’s a different Sayid.” He laughed. “Max Steiner never had this kind of problem!” Steiner, the composer for “Gone with the Wind,” pioneered much of the essential vocabulary of Hollywood scoring, including the Wagnerian practice of attaching leitmotifs to characters. Giacchino sometimes thinks of “Lost” in terms of music drama—he’s called it a “psychotic opera.”

Giacchino showed me a completed scene: Sayid rings at the door of a suburban home, which is opened by his old love interest, Nadia. In the fourth season of “Lost,” we learned that Nadia had been killed, but in the parallel reality of season six she is still alive and is married to Sayid’s brother. “But you can tell there’s some sort of past between them,” Giacchino said. He had framed their conversation with short, wistful chord progressions in G minor, one on the piano and one on the harp, over soft strings. Giacchino often reaches for this sweet-sad tone, complicating the show’s fantasy veneer.

Waiting to be scored was a conversation between Sayid and his brother, Omer, who is in debt to a gangster. “I need you to convince these people to leave me alone,” Omer says. Giacchino perked up: “That moment right there—‘I need you to convince them’—something’s happening. Sayid is obviously thinking, I don’t want to do this. Here I am trying to do better with my life, and my brother’s saying this creepy stuff. So I’ll just drop a marker to say that right there, at that time code, something’s amiss.”

Giacchino went back to the start of the scene: Sayid asleep on the couch, Omer waking him. “This could be nothing, really,” Giacchino said, mulling whether to add music. “But the way they shot it—Sayid asleep, then a hand coming into the frame—it’s almost as if they were daring me to do some sort of, you know, Bernard Herrmann thing.” Herrmann, a master mood-setter, scored Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho,” not to mention “Citizen Kane” and “Taxi Driver.”

Giacchino took the bait. In Digital Performer, he indicated that he wanted violas, and played a few E’s on the keyboard. They appeared on the left-hand screen, recorded as rectangles rather than as circular notes. “This is the fastest way to do it,” he explained. “The notes get transcribed, I indicate orchestration, and my assistant, Andrea Datzman, and my copyist, Booker White, put it into a score.” He marked the viola notes “sord”—short for “con sordini,” mutes on—and requested a tremolo, a quick back-and-forth movement of the bow. The shivery sound would match the Hitchcockian camerawork. He then typed “cluster out”—shorthand for an effect in which the players slide to their highest or lowest notes. This sonic shriek, a signature gesture on “Lost,” harks back to Iannis Xenakis’s avant-garde masterpiece “Metastasis,” composed in the early nineteen-fifties.

“So now we’re biding time, waiting for something to happen,” Giacchino said. “My favorite biding-time instrument on ‘Lost’ is the harp.” He wrote a series of whole-note E’s for the harp, in the octave below middle C. Typically, composers use the harp for bright, hill-over-dale scenes, but Giacchino draws out its darker properties.

He had arrived at the “something’s amiss” moment—the point at which he wanted to delve into Sayid’s inner world. He had the violins fall from G to F-sharp and then rise from G to A, in a gently twisting, Herrmannesque pattern. “Now I feel like I want to repeat it,” Giacchino said. “But in order to make it a little more serious, a little more grave, I’m going to put it on the cellos and bring it down an octave.” When the theme was first heard, it suggested Sayid’s sympathy for his brother, but now it indicated a dawning suspicion: Sayid was being asked to resume his wicked ways.

On the right-hand screen, which organizes the instrumental parts by register, Giacchino further modified the orchestration. He then advanced to the end of the dialogue, in which Omer applies more emotional pressure: “I know you care about Nadia. If you care about us, about her, you will do this, Sayid.” Sayid responds, “I am sorry, I am not that man anymore.”

The composer scratched his chin and tilted his head. “Here we get to the crux,” he said. “I want people to feel for this guy.” He reintroduced the pensive Sayid-Nadia theme. “When he mentions Nadia, just to kind of get the point across, I’ll take the same idea and put it up an octave, so it’s more delicate. And, instead of having that D-major triad at the end”—he took away two notes—“how about just an A, so you don’t get that final resolve? It leaves you feeling that something’s missing. ’Cause you’re wondering whether Sayid can follow through—is he really ‘not that man anymore’?”

Giacchino reviewed the scene, his software mimicking the instruments. For each glissando, he made a rhawhrrr noise. “It’ll sound better with real players,” he promised. He took out one tremolo viola note—“Silence is better.” He shortened other notes—“Again, just to let it breathe.” He decided that something was off with the timing: “I get to the Nadia music too soon. Maybe slow down the basses? O.K., that lands better.” He fiddled for a few more minutes. “And now I gotta let it go,” he said. “You could literally stay here all day, messing around, but there’s no time.”

Giacchino had spent half an hour on a scene lasting two minutes. One task remained: scoring a sequence on the island, in which Sayid has a confrontation with the Man in Black. Giacchino unleashed a full battery of eerie noises: a “cluster out,” sul ponticello strings (ghostly tones produced by bowing at the bridge), rasping notes for muted trombones, a nastily dissonant chord with two semitone clashes (“tritone on top of tritone, the ultimate ‘Lost’ chord”), a metallic moan produced by rubbing a Super Ball across a gong, and what he calls “spooky fill”—softly clattering tones from a marimba-like instrument called the flapamba. At one point, he was trying to decide on what note the violas should begin to cluster out, and asked me for a suggestion; I said, “C-sharp,” and C-sharp it was. Finally, at 3:40 P.M., he uploaded the file for his assistant. The next morning, the music would be recorded, in a three-hour session.

“It’s a little crazy, working like this,” Giacchino said. “But there’s something to be said for not laboring over everything endlessly. It’s how composers used to operate. One of my favorite things I ever read was the letters between Mozart and his father. It made me realize that nothing has changed. He’s just out there looking for the next gig: ‘This duke wants this—if I can get out there and show what I can do. . . .’ Obviously, I’m not Mozart. But this show has allowed me to explore so many different things—moments of peace, moments of complete madness—even though I’m working in a kind of box. I don’t have time to second-guess myself, and neither does anyone else. What we just messed around with here, tomorrow morning we’ll throw it in front of the players, and a week or two later it’ll be coming out of the TV. I’m still kind of amazed I get away with it.”

The art of film scoring is more than a hundred years old, having officially begun with Camille Saint-Saëns’s music for the 1908 film “The Assassination of the Duke of Guise.” It has gone through several phases, which might be called the Romantic, the jazz-modern, the pop-avant, the neo-Romantic, and the pop-synthetic. The heyday of the Romantic period was the nineteen-thirties, when émigré composers such as Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold specialized in post-Wagnerian opulence. The modern phase began with Bernard Herrmann’s brooding score for “Citizen Kane.” In the years during and after the Second World War, film music became jazzier and edgier; David Raksin, Alex North, Leonard Rosenman, and Elmer Bernstein added dissonance, even spells of atonality. (Rosenman, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, got hired in Hollywood at the urging of his friend James Dean, who went through a phase of listening avidly to Bartók and Stravinsky records.) In the sixties, all rules were suspended: Jerry Goldsmith wrote a fully avant-garde score for “Planet of the Apes,” and Stanley Kubrick deployed György Ligeti’s otherworldly soundscapes in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

At the same time, the sixties were a time of crisis for film music. The breakdown of Hollywood’s studio system led to the demise of studio orchestras, in which dozens of brilliant émigré musicians once played. Meanwhile, directors and producers courted youthful audiences by jettisoning composed scores in favor of au-courant pop, along the lines of the Simon & Garfunkel montages in “The Graduate.” In the seventies, the Korngold style had an unexpected renaissance: the young moguls Steven Spielberg and George Lucas both had a craving for full-on symphonic sound, and John Williams sated them with his dazzling Technicolor scores for “Star Wars,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” In the eighties, the advent of high-tech synthesizers and sampling, not to mention the ineradicable spectre of the pop-song montage, again endangered the live orchestral score.

There is abiding uncertainty about what film music is supposed to do. Cliché holds that the best score is one that you don’t notice while you’re watching, but that’s dubious: filmgoers certainly registered the music in “Psycho” and “Star Wars.” These days, composers are under pressure to blend in—to echo whatever was done in the last successful picture in the genre. Because the score is added in the final stages of post-production, the process is often rushed. And the director may know little about music. This winter, I spent a few days at the Sundance Film Festival, which has a thriving film-music program, and attended a panel discussion at which the composer George S. Clinton told the following story: “I actually had a director once. The orchestra was playing fortissimo, which is very loud. . . . He said, ‘Can’t they play any louder?’ And I said, ‘Well, they’re already playing fortissimo.’ And he said, ‘Tell them to play fivetissimo.’ ”

Several composers at Sundance mentioned the frustrating phenomenon of the “temp track,” a temporary soundtrack that directors and editors create while they are preparing a rough cut of their film. All too often, composers are told to replicate, with minor variations, whatever mélange of pop, classical, and film music was used in the temp. A composer may get hired only after a director realizes that licensing songs will cost too much. “It’s the bane of many composers’ existence,” Jon Burlingame, who teaches film-music history at U.S.C. and covers the business for Variety, says. “It’s hard enough to create a mood in two minutes and thirty-five seconds, but when you’re hamstrung by someone else’s idea of what the music in the scene should be it poses a huge creative problem.”

Another issue is outsourcing. The Los Angeles musicians’ union asks for fairly stiff fees, and filmmakers often go outside the city to make recordings, if they use live music at all. Favorite destinations are Seattle and Eastern European cities such as Prague and Bratislava. Burlingame explains, “When you go out of town, you can get a ‘buyout,’ meaning that you pay once to record the score and then do anything you want with it, whereas in L.A. the tradition is that the musicians share in the profits if there is a soundtrack album or other reuse. The buyout may save you money, sure, but the best musicians to play this kind of music are here in L.A. No matter what you put in front of them, whether it’s big-band jazz or the most complex aleatoric thing, they can do it.”

Giacchino is popular among studio players, because he almost always draws on local talent, preferring musicians who played on soundtracks he heard as a kid. “To work with me, you have to be seventy or older,” he joked. (Jack Hayes, his favorite orchestrator, is ninety-one.) The walls of his house are hung with old movie posters and vintage photographs, and he relaxes by listening to classic radio serials. He can sound old-fogeyish when he analyzes the state of the art. “Nothing is real anymore,” he told me. “You don’t get to hear live playing. And a lot of the writing is, well, terrible. I’m always making my kids watch all the old shows with live musicians.”

J. J. Abrams, who hired Giacchino not only for “Lost” but also for two feature films he directed, “Mission: Impossible III” and “Star Trek,” seconds his composer’s insistence on using an orchestra. “You could argue that it costs more,” Abrams told me. “But I would argue it costs a lot more not to use one.” For whatever it’s worth, the bottom line of Giacchino’s Hollywood career is impressive: if you count forward from 2004, when he broke into the mainstream with his score for the Pixar film “The Incredibles,” he has scored eleven films, which, collectively, have made $3.3 billion.

Giacchino grew up in Edgewater Park, New Jersey, a township northeast of Philadelphia. His parents were schoolteachers. He immersed himself in his father’s record collection, which included big-band swing, Broadway cast albums, and, not least, soundtracks (Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn,” Maurice Jarre’s “Lawrence of Arabia”). Not long after “Star Wars” came out, he was given the soundtrack as a Christmas present, and he studied the liner notes, in which Williams talked about his methods. (“I try not to read scripts,” Williams wrote, saying that he preferred to react to the images.) Giacchino listened to classical radio stations but didn’t care for rock: “For some reason, as a kid I felt outwardly embarrassed to say that I liked rock music. I don’t know where that came from. For me it just wasn’t cool—orchestral music was cool.” He remembers watching “2001” and “Planet of the Apes” on TV. He had no names for the unusual sounds he was hearing, but he incorporated them into his pantheon of musical favorites.

His first ambition was to be a filmmaker. In his back yard, he made movies with his father’s 8-mm. camera, getting the neighborhood kids involved. He created soundtracks by laboriously copying musical excerpts onto cassettes and then synchronizing his cues with a stopwatch. On occasion, he brought a tape recorder into a movie theatre to augment his collection. After a few years of piano lessons, he started writing his own music. Still, a filmmaking career remained his goal; he attended the School of Visual Arts, in New York, majoring in film production. Only after college did his interest in composing deepen to the point that he began studying harmony and orchestration in earnest. He got a day job in film publicity, at the New York office of the Walt Disney Company, and a generous boss arranged for him to take night classes at Juilliard. He recalled, “Anytime I wrote anything resembling a strong melody, they said, ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong.’ ”

Giacchino moved to Los Angeles in 1992, and continued to work in film by day and study music by night. He got a job at DreamWorks Interactive, as a video-game producer, and began giving himself the job of writing the musical cues that play at different stages of a game. In 1997, a major assignment came along, in the form of a game based on Spielberg’s dinosaur epic “The Lost World.” One day, he found himself face to face with Spielberg, who liked the music, perhaps because it often resembled that of John Williams. Up to that point, Giacchino had been using synthesized sound, but Spielberg announced that he wanted a live orchestra. “He was so great to me—this kid who hardly knew what he was doing,” Giacchino recalled.

He wrote video-game scores for several more years, winning wider notice for Medal of Honor, a popular shooter game set in the Second World War. His heroic cues still sounded like Williams lite, but in some passages he experimented with a twentieth-century vocabulary, glissandos included. Among the fans of Medal of Honor were J. J. Abrams and his partner, Bryan Burk, who, in 2001, were looking for a composer for “Alias,” a trippy espionage show that had just been bought by ABC. Abrams, who started out, in the nineties, as a high-concept screenwriter (“Regarding Henry,” “Armageddon”), was about to make his name as a master of intricate pop-culture puzzles.

“When Michael and I started working together, it was almost as if we had grown up together,” Abrams told me. “Our references were so similar.” Abrams, too, zealously collected soundtracks as a kid, scouring the cutout bins at record stores. He has also dabbled in composition, writing theme music for several of the TV shows he produces. (The electronic texture that is heard over the fifteen-second main title of “Lost” is Abrams’s creation.) Abrams hired a live orchestra for “Alias,” beating back resistance at the network, and essentially let Giacchino run amok.

The happiest film composers tend to be those who fall into a steady relationship with a discerning director. Herrmann had such a bond with Hitchcock—at least, until the director cut him loose in a vain attempt to acquire pop cachet. John Williams has long prospered in league with Spielberg; Danny Elfman is the musical voice of Tim Burton; James Newton Howard works closely with M. Night Shyamalan. Abrams goes further than most directors, identifying his favored composer almost as a fellow-filmmaker. “His sense of story is so strong that I give him my scripts before I shoot them,” Abrams told me. “In the case of ‘Star Trek,’ Michael and I discussed the placement of all the cues before we shot the film. If he’s unable to figure out how to score a particular moment, it usually means that that moment isn’t really working.”

The relationship isn’t free of disagreement. Giacchino, whose easygoing manner masks a stubborn streak, seldom rolls over when his ideas are questioned, and a few yelling matches have resulted. The tempests pass quickly, though. After a couple of seasons of “Lost,” Abrams asked Giacchino to stop ending each sequence with a trombone glissando. “It sounds like a clown’s going to come out,” Abrams protested. In response, Giacchino sent him an engraved trombone. The glissandos remain, although perhaps they don’t pop up as frequently.

Episodes of “Lost” do have temp tracks attached when they arrive in Giacchino’s studio, but the music comes from earlier episodes; in any case, he mutes the track when viewing the footage. (Sometimes he listens to the temp once he is done, to see whether he has overlooked any possibilities, but he seldom changes his mind.) The show’s creators take it for granted that he will stamp his personality on their work. In the scripts, he appears as a distinct character known as “the GIACCHINO.” The script for the “Sundown” episode contains such technical directions as “the GIACCHINO RAMPS UP,” “the GIACCHINO CRESCENDOS,” and “HAUNTING GIACCHINO CUE PLAYS underneath it all.”

The morning after Giacchino finished writing the music for “Sundown,” the “Lost” orchestra gathered to record the soundtrack. The session was held at the Eastwood Scoring Stage, on the Warner Bros. lot, in Burbank. It’s a cavernous, five-thousand-square-foot space, and much history lingers in the wood-panelled walls. “This is where Korngold recorded ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ and ‘Sea Hawk,’ ” Giacchino told me, with puppyish enthusiasm. I recalled that a big “Robin Hood” poster hung in his living room. “But, in place of Korngold’s hundred-piece orchestra, I’ve got this group that’s, like, weird and wrong: forty-one strings, four trombonists, one harpist, one pianist, and two percussion players.”

I later asked Giacchino what had led him to this combination. “When J.J. and I first talked about ‘Lost,’ some people at ABC were saying that the music should be nothing but jungle drums, jungle flutes,” he said. “I was, like, ‘Why would you do that? For me, it feels like you want this show to be the most uncomfortable experience ever. Why not come up with an ensemble that has nothing to do with what you’d expect?’ So I went with strings, trombones, percussion. No French horns—too noble. But these instruments can do almost anything. The strings give you moments of lyricism, but they turn nasty in an instant. The trombones are mean and ugly when they need to be, but with the right mutes they sound almost like a woodwind choir. Of course, some of the executives said, ‘That’s too weird. People are going to change the channel.’ ”

We walked toward a semi-enclosed space at the back of the stage, where the percussionists are based. The lead player is Emil Richards, a legendary figure not only in Hollywood film music but also in the worldwide percussion community. “This is the guy who played the bongos on Lalo Schifrin’s ‘Mission: Impossible’ theme,” Giacchino told me. “He came up with all that wild stuff on ‘Planet of the Apes.’ He’s a genius.” Seventy-seven years old, Richards has lived in Hollywood since 1959, when he came to town as the vibes player in the George Shearing Quintet. He has appeared on some two thousand soundtracks, beginning with “The Diary of Anne Frank.” He has collaborated with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Harry Partch, the avant-garde composer and instrument-maker. In decades of touring, he has amassed a huge percussion collection—seven hundred and fifty different types of instruments.

“Hey, man, how are you?” Richards said to Giacchino. He was standing in front of an angklung—a Javanese-style instrument usually made of suspended bamboo tubes, which make a brittle ring. Next to the angklung was a flapamba, the source of Giacchino’s “spooky fill.” When it comes to such effects, Giacchino often leaves the specifics to Richards. One cue in the “Sundown” score asked for a “scary long ringing hit (try some options).” Richards decided to use two small Japanese temple bells. “You hit them together and they make a really nice sound,” he told me. “Also, I used a hubcap with three springs on it. When you shake it, it goes raaahhh.”

Later, at Giacchino’s urging, I dropped by Richards’s home, in Toluca Lake, to see part of his collection. He showed me Balinese gongs, turtle rattles, ocarinas, a water drum, a glass harmonica made of quartz (its maker, Gerhard Finkenbeiner, disappeared on a solo plane flight in 1999). At one point, Richards removed a lamp from what seemed to be a coffee table with a brass base. The base was in fact an ancient Japanese temple bell, which he found at a roadside sale some years ago. “This woman had a palm tree sitting in it, but I could see what it was from the hand hammering around the rim. ‘How much for the brass piece?’ I asked, as casually as I could. ‘A hundred dollars,’ she said. It was probably worth six thousand. When my daughter, Camille, was young, this was her crib. Whenever she cried, we’d hit it very lightly”—Richards ran a mallet around the rim, creating a softly booming tone—“and she’d calm down. I brought it to work a few times. You know who used to like it? Mancini.”

At the scoring stage, Giacchino moved on to the trombones. One of them, Alex Iles, a convivial, bespectacled forty-eight-year-old, serves as the principal trombonist of the Long Beach Symphony, and has subbed for the L.A. Philharmonic. After the session, he told me, “Michael’s so loyal to the players he uses. Young horn players who’ve just come to town are asking me, ‘Is there even going to be a business for us?’ Television used to be the bread and butter—now so few shows use live players. Michael insists on it. So often, the director or the producer tells the composer what’s going to happen. Michael is in the unusual position of being able to say, ‘No, this is what’s going to happen.’ ”

Next to the control room is a small soundproofed studio, which, at “Lost” sessions, is dedicated to the harp, that all-important instrument of anxious waiting. Giacchino usually calls on Gayle Levant, who has been playing harp at film and pop sessions for some forty-five years, since she was a teen-ager. Her father, the Brooklyn-born violinist Mark Levant, served as the concertmaster of several studio orchestras in the thirties and forties. She got her first big job playing in Liberace’s show in Las Vegas, and a few years later she spent a month gliding around on a remote-controlled gondola at Dome of the Sea, the lagoon restaurant at the Dunes Hotel, strumming her harp and chatting with diners at their tables. You have heard her on everything from Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” to the theme for “The Simpsons.”

“Gayle, could you play your note?” Giacchino asked her.

Levant, an elegant woman who slightly resembles Carol Burnett, put down her sudoku and obliged with a darkly booming low C. The same tone is heard at the outset of the death-obsessed final song of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.”

“There’s also the pencil effect,” Giacchino said. Levant picked up a pencil and shook the point rapidly between two of the strings. It made a ghostly, sputtering sound.

“And the nail,” Giacchino said. Levant plucked a string with the tip of her fingernail, giving it a cruel snap. Although harpists generally need to keep their nails as short as possible, Levant lets a couple of her nails grow longer in the week before a “Lost” session.

Giacchino turned to me and said, “I always feel guilty. Gayle is one of the greatest harp players on the planet, but when she comes to ‘Lost’ she has to sit here for three hours going boiiiiing, boiiiiing.” He said to Levant, “I try to think of new material for you, Gayle, but I keep coming back to that note.”

The conductor was Tim Simonec, a bulky, silver-haired man who has been working with Giacchino since his video-game days. He was almost the only person in the room paying attention to the show itself, which played silently on a screen behind the orchestra. Presiding in the control room, which had an eighteen-foot-wide Solid State Logic audio console, was the engineer Dan Wallin, who has been mixing music on Hollywood films since the nineteen-fifties. Eighty-three years old, he has a California ancient-mariner look—white beard, ponytail, baseball cap. He favors a bright, forward sound, without much reverb; Levant’s harp notes jump out as a result. “I love how he records, the old-school way,” Giacchino told me. “These days, so much in the orchestration gets washed away. I remember a composer saying that he liked reverb because it hides the mistakes. I like hearing the mistakes—it reminds you that real people are making this music.”

Once the session began, Giacchino took up a position on the right-hand side of the audio console, standing over a copy of the score. He communicated via microphone with Simonec, sometimes giving instructions and sometimes trading wisecracks.

“That was a cool dissonance, Michael,” Simonec said at one point, when a player entered early. “Maybe you want to keep it?”

“I’m surprised you noticed,” Giacchino merrily replied.

After a short cue in which the violins had nothing but octaves, Simonec exclaimed, “Sheer genius, Michael! Your masterpiece! How much did you suffer to get that?” The orchestra sardonically applauded, and Giacchino gave a mock bow.

The jokes subsided as time began running out. Giacchino wasn’t entirely satisfied with what he’d produced, and rewrote some passages on the fly. “At 18, keep everyone sord,” he said. “Gayle, 18 through 20, play whole notes, not half notes. Cellos and basses, 18 through 27, very light, play the whole value.” He asked for retakes on certain trickier cues, but the musicians mainly got it right on the first take.

Almost every note recorded at the session could be heard on the finished show. (At a final mixing session, the producers sometimes ask for adjustments: to accommodate a slight cut in “Sundown,” for example, a few bars of “waiting” music were replaced by the Super Ball-on-gong noise.) In all, Giacchino’s score filled nearly thirty-five minutes of a forty-minute episode, including a continuous, nine-minute stretch during the climax, when destruction falls upon a temple where a number of the characters have taken refuge. Although the music generally played at full volume, it seemed to hover around the actors’ voices rather than smother them—a fact that the actors appreciate.

Michael Emerson, who portrays a fascinatingly sinister island habitué named Ben, called from Hawaii, where he was filming the “Lost” finale, to discuss what it was like to act opposite the Giacchino. “I’m a kind of critical moviegoer,” he said, in his precise, insinuating voice. “I feel so often that films are overscored, or they’re scored in a bright-major-key, full-symphonic kind of way. Michael is the antidote. I love the minimalism of his work on ‘Lost.’ He can get more out of a little bit of scratching on the string of a cello—instantly the hair stands up on the back of your neck. It’s a tremendous kind of shorthand. I love the adult gravity, the sense of loss and sadness, that comes out in all the major themes of our show. And yet those themes manage to be just on the edge of an explosion of violence at any moment. That seems to capture it completely, in a beautiful way. And I love how subliminal it feels. Sometimes, I’m only barely aware that there is musical accompaniment. It’s as if the music is in my head and not in the TV.”

A few weeks later, Giacchino won his Oscar, for “Up.” He’d been nominated once before, for his work on another Pixar film, “Ratatouille.” His speech made no mention of directors, agents, or assistants. Instead, he talked about growing up in Edgewater Park. “Never once in my life did my parents ever say, ‘What you’re doing is a waste of time,’ ” Giacchino said. “I had teachers, I had colleagues, I had people that I worked with all through my life who always told me what you’re doing is not a waste of time. . . . I know there are kids out there that don’t have that support system, so if you’re out there and you’re listening, listen to me: If you want to be creative, get out there and do it. It’s not a waste of time. Do it. O.K.? Thank you.”

“Up” tells of an elderly man and a chubby boy who go on a balloon adventure, and, like other Pixar projects, it’s more literate and sophisticated than most movies now being made for adults. In the opening scene, we see the old man, Carl, as a boy, beginning to fall in love with Ellie, a neighborhood girl. Then, in a wordless four-minute scene, we see a montage of Carl and Ellie’s life together, ending with Ellie’s illness and death. “Like everyone else, I burst into tears when I first saw the sequence,” Giacchino told me, at a café in his neighborhood, a few weeks after his Oscar win. “It communicates so strongly how life whizzes by.” He scored it in his usual spare manner, writing a poignant waltzing melody and favoring a band of guitar, violin, clarinet, and bass. As in “Lost,” he leaned on chords that fall from major to minor, and further economized by telescoping them into one bittersweet, slightly dissonant harmony. His restraint makes the sequence all the more affecting.

At the next “Lost” session, Gayle Levant—who, along with many other members of the orchestra, had played on “Up”—presented Giacchino with an enormous cake that bore the legend “Congratulations, Michael, We Love You.” Giacchino had brought in his Oscar and other awards he had lately collected—a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and two Grammys—and the musicians took turns posing for pictures with them. Giacchino had to draw the line, though, when the players started asking if they could take the awards home.

Giacchino has been pondering what to do next. Some part of him has always wanted to play a larger role in the filmmaking process, and he has talked to Abrams about the possibilities. He is taking the summer off from film scoring and will try his hand at writing an extended concert piece, at the invitation of the Dallas Symphony. He plans to stop writing for television—the rushed schedule has become too exhausting, even for him. Yet he feels wistful at the prospect of giving up the medium in which he has had singular success.

“Of everything I’ve done in my career, or whatever you want to call it, ‘Lost’ is the purest version of me musically,” Giacchino said, sipping iced tea. “I grew up with so many different sounds, and ‘Lost’ allows me to express all of it, the melodic and the atonal. It’s also the purest version of me emotionally—I’m reacting to these characters that I’ve spent so much time with. It works because I love the show—I have the same attitude as some guy who curls up on his sofa on Tuesday night to watch. I’m not making calculated decisions—oh, this cue has to sound like a nineteen-twenties thing, this has to sound like an epic Trojan War thing. It’s much more intuitive than that. It’s the music I would write if I were writing for myself. In my Dallas piece, I’ll see how far I can go in the same direction, without my ‘Lost’ friends in front of me.”

J. J. Abrams is probably right when he says that “Lost” might never have become a phenomenon without Giacchino’s contribution. When I watched the pilot recently on DVD, I realized how effortlessly the music ensnares the ears. In the first two minutes, you hear a sinuously creepy harp figure that does a fluttery, four-note turn and then rises a fourth. Giacchino calls the theme “the spirit of the island,” and has used it throughout the series. The way such fragments of themes keep developing from episode to episode creates an overarching human tension that plugged-in pop songs can’t match. Familiar music is a convenient crutch, but, in the end, it covers emotions in a plastic sheen. Unfamiliar music gives the sense that something new is happening before our eyes and ears.

Mayhem is building as “Lost” moves toward its conclusion, yet Giacchino’s gift for plainspoken melody will emerge at the very end. On May 6th, Giacchino was completing the music for the final two episodes of the show, which will air in a two-and-a-half-hour marathon. A double recording session was scheduled for the following day. In midafternoon, I received an e-mail containing a cue entitled “Parallelocam”—forty-four bars in slow, elegiac C major, with a piano playing against a soft wash of strings. Giacchino’s chords of perpetual ambivalence seemed to be tilting toward some soulful resolution. In the final two bars, though, I saw a low, solitary C for the harp, which, like the best mysteries, could be read any number of ways. ♦

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996.